Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

How Children Subsidize ‘Low, Low Prices’

By Kj Dell’Antonia November 28, 2012 9:50 amNovember 28, 2012 9:50 am

A significant part of our national antipoverty strategy over the past few decades has been increasing employment — moving people, particularly mothers, off “welfare rolls” and into jobs. But the types of jobs available to most lower-income parents, mothers and fathers alike, are low-wage jobs that present their own problems to those trying to support and raise a family. The lack of benefits, the inflexible hours and the often nonstandard shifts exacerbate the low pay and create a situation in which parents don’t have the time they want and need to spend with their children or the money to find high-quality substitutes (like activities and child care) for that time.

The result, according to the Boston College sociologist Lisa Dodson and Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is that their parents’ low-wage jobs put youth at risk. Adolescents from households headed by a low-income worker are more likely to drop out of school, to be obese and to take on adult roles too young. In providing child care for siblings and forgoing opportunities that require an engaged parent helping with homework or encouraging outside activities, teenage children in low-wage families are, Drs. Dodson and Albelda argue, “effectively subsidizing” their parents’ employment as home health aides, janitors, food-service providers and retail clerks.

That can’t be what we hoped to achieve with welfare reform. “Policymakers tend to put things into what we call ‘silos,’” Dr. Dodson said. “Jobs here. Kids there. Instead, we need to look at the ways these things affect each other. The structure of low-wage jobs creates a particular kind of obstacle for parents trying to take good care of their kids.” And children thrust into their own care-giving roles are children who aren’t easily able to develop the skills they need to do better than a low-wage job for themselves as adults. The low-wage job cycle becomes a vicious one.

“How,” I asked her after I read the report, “is this anything except just depressing?” As economic struggles push people into low-wage jobs, their limited resources press retailers to keep prices low and affordable — and one way to do that, as American Public Media’s Marketplace reported, is to create still more low-wage jobs, often temp jobs, that don’t cost a company in benefits or demand steady pay for a worker in the off-season. With one in four workers in a low-wage job today, and low-wage work projected to account for two out of every three new jobs in the United States over the next decade, it’s hard to see the constructive side of a report on how those same jobs are difficult not just for workers, but for their families, and even harder to see how we get out of either cycle.

“Well,” she answered, “people are talking about it. We see efforts to get more flexibility in the workplace. We hope to get the folks who are interested in improving low-wage jobs to talk to the people concerned about youth, and the people talking about kids and the importance of parental involvement to understand what kind of jobs those parents have.”

It’s part of our cultural narrative to insist that parents are fully responsible for raising our children (despite our national need to “produce” another generation of healthy, well-educated adults capable of filling the jobs we now hold). But you don’t have to favor subsidized day care or mandated child-care leaves for all to recognize that the forces that create and structure low-wage jobs are just one of the ways our society’s choices actively make taking that responsibility more difficult. We choose, again and again, to ignore the very real needs of the significant proportion of the work force with children at home. The result, in the low-wage worker’s world, is that job flexibility becomes the ability to quit one job and later find another, and many people describe themselves as being one sick kid away from unemployment.

“These families couldn’t remain intact without the effort of young kids stepping into adult shoes,” Dr. Dodson said, but without the chance to cultivate their own talents, many of these teenagers will find themselves playing out the low-wage job cycle with their own children. That’s good for creating a nation of low-wage workers, and bad for the American tradition of helping each generation do better than the one before.

A version of this post appeared in print on November 29, 2012, on page D2.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more